Observations on staggered fermions at nonzero lattice spacing

We show that the use of the fourth-root trick in lattice QCD with staggered fermions corresponds to a nonlocal theory at nonzero lattice spacing, but argue that the nonlocal behavior is likely to go away in the continuum limit. We give examples of this nonlocal behavior in the free theory, and for the case of a fixed topologically nontrivial background gauge field. In both special cases, the nonlocal behavior indeed disappears in the continuum limit. Our results invalidate a recent claim that at nonzero lattice spacing an additive mass renormalization is needed because of taste-symmetry breaking.